The Finale Celebration for the Start-Up Challenge will be held on January 24th in San Francisco. As part of the celebration, we'll be conducting an Applications Workshop where you can learn more about building mobile apps, building web apps, and using AWS in a cost-efficient fashion. You need to register now if you would like to attend the Workshops and the Finale Celebration.

We received close to 2,500 applications for the 2012 AWS Start-Up Challenge! Applications arrived from every state in the US and from 84 other countries including Iceland, Ghana, Bahrain, Nepal, Cambodia, and Malawi.

Over the summer months, we'd like to share a few stories from startups around the world: what are they working on and how they are using the cloud to get things done. Today, we're profiling Filter Squad from Perth, Australia!

Filter Squad is a startup focused on building “apps that find what you like”, according to CTO Stuart Hall. They began with a #1 selling iPad/iPhone app called Discovr Music in January 2011 and expanded the discovery product suite to include Discovr App in June 2011, which has been a #1 category application in 17 countries. As the name implies, Discovr Music makes it easy for users to find music they like based on their preferences, while Discovr App recommends apps the user might like based on the ones you're already using. “We have been extremely happy with AWS and we also plan to use it for our future products. We are big fans of products such as Amazon RDS and the Elastic Load Balancer to give a complete app scaling solution with Amazon EC2”, says Stuart.

Take a look at the Discovr Music app review from Fox News:

AWS & Lean Startups

Because we are a small, lean team, we were looking for a hosting solution that was going to be easy for us to setup, be reliable, and be easy to scale up and down throughout our product iterations. We looked at a large number of providers, but AWS stood out immediately for a number of reasons:

Low maintenance

Easy to scale

Simple to setup

Provided good redundancy

We couldn't find anyone else who could match the AWS products and price. The number of other large, successful companies also using the service was very reassuring.

Building a Native iPhone/iPad App on AWS

Native mobile apps often need server-side components to create a rich user experience. For our Discovr Apps and Discover Music apps, we have used the following AWS products:

Amazon EC2 - because we had no idea of the market reaction to the application when we launched, flexibility in adding and removing virtual servers based on demand was key.

Amazon RDS - we needed a database that would also be easy to scale and be easy to maintain. Amazon RDS provided easy scaling, easy replication for slave instances, and a system where minor software updates are handled entirely by AWS.

Amazon S3 - S3 provides a great and cheap way to host static resources, one with which we had worked before and found ideal for our use case.

Amazon Elastic Load Balancer - the load balancer is provided straight out of the box: it doesn't require any installing and it needs very little configuration. The load balancer provides built in health checks and takes out instances that are not behaving. Elastic load balancing has been faultless since we launched.

Caching: the only thing missing was a caching solution, which AWS has since launched and we will be soon moving to. This was also a big consideration, the pace at which AWS are iterating and improving their service matches our philosophy to application development.

We are also big fans of New Relic for monitoring our AWS instance performance.

Scaling up Ruby on Rails with AWS

We use Ruby on Rails server side, Objective C, and Java for client side. More details of our stack, including our architecture and test data, can be seen detailed on our blog.

Words of Wisdom for Other Startups:

Understand that you can do it from anywhere, you don’t have to be based in Silicon Valley, or even a big city. With the help of the internet and web services such as the AWS cloud, anyone can deliver great products from anywhere in the world.

For example we’re based in Perth, Australia. It’s a five hour flight to Sydney and our hometown is most definitely not the tech capital of the world! To sum up:

Build a great product, then don't forget to market it!

Treat your customers like precious gold.

Make it easy for your customers to talk to you and listen to what they say.

8 Days Left to Enter Your Startup in the AWS Start-up Challenge!This year's AWS Start-up Challenge is a worldwide competition with prizes at all levels, including up to $100,000 in cash, AWS credits, and more for the grand prize winner. Learn more and enter today!

You can also follow @AWSStartups on Twitter for startup-related updates.

Over the summer months, we'd like to share a few stories from startups around the world: what are they working on and how they are using the cloud to get things done. Today I’m speaking to Jonathan and Thomas, two of the creators of Scalarium, from Berlin, Germany!

R: Hi guys, could you briefly describe Scalarium and the background of your team?

Thomas:

With Scalarium, we've created an easy management service for EC2 clusters. Scalarium helps our customers deploy Rails, Node.js, PHP, Java, Python or any other stack. It automates the initial setup and continuous configuration of servers. Scalarium also takes care of scaling, security, monitoring, and a lot more.

We started as an IT consultancy in 2005 and used EC2 from the early days on to help our clients scale out. Doing so, we realized that we repeated ourselves in this kind of projects. So we created Scalarium as a framework that helps customers automate EC2 deployments.

R: How have you incorporated Amazon Web Services as part of your own architecture? What services are you using and how?

Jonathan:

We heavily use EC2, EBS and S3. And in our stack you will find Ruby, CouchDB, Redis, RabbitMQ, Chef and other nice and shiny stuff. We brought you a little illustration that shows you how we run Scalarium on EC2. But before that, you will need to understand a little more about what we do.

As said, Scalarium helps customers run apps on EC2. But instead of offering you some restrictive and expensive PaaS solution, we offer you an elegant way to automate everything on your servers. So you will still maintain root access to all servers and are able to configure each and every setting.

R: How does Scalarium help customers run apps on AWS?

Thomas:

In the cloud, each server goes through something that we would describe as a server life cycle. Each and every server in your cluster comes to existence at some time, it experiences some changes and it goes at some point later. Some of them have a rather short lifespan like application servers that are used to burst out, others have long lifespans like database servers. But all of them go trough this cycle.

We defined events in this life cycle which we and you can hook into to execute scripts on the servers. The life cycle events that are used in Scalarium are the following ones.

Setup is used to update a base image and install everything you need on the fly as soon as the server comes into existence.

Configure is triggered by any change in the cluster - new servers coming or old ones going.

Deploy executes scripts that should run during the deployment of an application on the servers. You can hook into the deployment with before_migrate or any other hook you know from Capistrano.

Undeploy - this is triggered if you want to remove an application.

Shutdown is triggered if you gracefully stop a server. You can copy stuff around or inform other servers about the absence of the server in advance.

Now imagine a very basic setup with one load balancer, a couple of app servers and a single database.What would you need to do if you wanted to add another app server to your stack? (click image below to enlarge)

You would need to boot an AMI (Amazon Machine Image), log in to the machine, install updates and dependencies, configure all services, cron jobs and so on and last but not least deploy your application. But you are not done yet. You also need to log in to the database server and grant access to the new app server by adding the IP to your ACL. After that you have to log in to your load balancer and add the app server to the load cycle.

This procedure is rather tedious even for easy and basic setups like this, but as you can imagine, the number of dependencies and tasks grows very fast as soon as you have more tiers and servers in your cluster.

What would you do if one of your servers dies or isn’t reachable due to some temporary network issues? Have a look at the Netflix Tech Blog and learn about the chaos monkey and his friends if you think your servers will be always on and flawless forever.

We created Scalarium to take care of this type of concerns automatically. You can extend the abilities of Scalarium as you like because you can react to all life cycle events and hook into them. This enables you to do just about everything. You always start with a “vanilla” OS and in the end you have a totally customized setup on your server and all other servers in the cluster know how to react and reconfigure themselves. We offer a broad selection of predefined stacks and examples. You can change them easily or add your own ones.

R: How does the bootstrapping of an instance work?

Jonathan:

In this picture you see roughly what happens behind the curtains if a new server is added to a cluster (click image to enlarge):

As soon as a new server is requested, we ask Amazon for it. Once the server finished booting it downloads the Scalarium agent and a custom certificate, installs the agent and connects back to Scalarium in an encrypted and signed way. We check what kind of server you instructed it to be and execute the appropriate Chef recipes. Chef is an open-source system integration framework, similar to Puppet or CFEngine. Check out our example cookbooks on github to get a feeling about how easy it is to use Chef. You will find the main Scalarium cookbooks there too.

The server bootstraps and will be your new app server, database or whatever you wanted it to be. This process usually takes just one or two minutes depending on the stack you want to install and the size of the server.

After successful bootstrapping of a new server, all existing servers in the cluster get informed. This step is very important. Because now, recipes bound to the configure event are executed on each server in the cluster. That way, load balancers can execute recipes that ensure that they are aware of all running app servers and that they can safely remove stopped app servers from their load cycle. A database server can check if it has granted access to the available app servers. But of course you also could do advanced things like adding new database servers and re-balance your data, update your nagios alerting or your graylog2 server to catch all the logs you want.

If you are done with your basic setup you can easily add time or load based servers, add and deploy applications to your cluster or clone the complete environment to create a staging system. All that can be done via the UI or the Scalarium API.

R: How do you run on AWS yourself?Thomas:

Below is a simplified visualization of our own architecture. We use two main databases for Scalarium. One is CouchDB, used to store information like the cluster configurations, server descriptions and current state, applications, deployment definitions. The other one is Redis, used for accounting, events, monitoring and metering data.

We chose CouchDB for high availability, easy replication, clustering, robustness, and a short recovery time. Redis is awesome for the very dynamic, fast growing, and non critical data we have.

Our setup spans multiple regions and availability zones to guarantee a high uptime. CouchDB’s awesome replication features are used to have a master/master replication across regions. Redis uses a master/slave setup for data replication. (click image below to enlarge)

R: Why did you decide to use AWS?Thomas:

That’s simple. We use AWS because it’s the only big, global distributed and reliable source for IaaS out there. Amazon kicks some serious ass and develops tons of new features and services. Last but not least we eat our own dog food - Scalarium runs on Amazon and is managed with Scalarium.

By using AWS and Scalarium we can grow in no time to handle as many customers we like, spin up staging environments, deploy fast and often and do all that completely automated. All fail over, scaling, backup tasks, monitoring and so on is automated. You will love doing that. You can concentrate on developing your app without hassling with data centers and servers.

Amazon enables us to have clients ranging from start ups with one server, over SaaS offerings and agencies with a couple of servers, to the world’s biggest social game providers like wooga or Plinga with an incredible number of servers running their games all over the globe.

Yes. Take part in the Global AWS Start-Up Challenge! It is a short application form. You can win cash, AWS credits and get a lot of visibility. And if that’s not enough we give every semi finalist half a year free Scalarium on top.

Over the summer months, we'd like to share a few stories from startups around the world: what are they working on and how they are using the cloud to get things done. Today, we're profiling ShowNearby, from Singapore!

ShowNearby is a leading location-based service in Singapore and an early adopter of the Android platform. Unlike many mobile apps out there, ShowNearby started with deployment on Android and then moved on to the iPhone by mid 2010 and Blackberry by fall of 2010. Today, the ShowNearby flagship app is available on Android, iPhone and Blackberry and reports approximately 100 Million mobile searches conducted across all its platforms.

I spoke to Stephen Bylo, Senior Cloud Architect at ShowNearby, who added a bit of color to the experience of running, planning, and meeting the requirements of a popular mobile app. If you're not from Singapore and would like to see the app, here's a quick video demo of ShowNearby.

Surviving Our Success with AWS

Due to the success of our application, we had a very big growth in a short period of time. When we launched on the popular platforms of iOS and subsequently BlackBerry, we were blown away by the huge surge of users that started using ShowNearby. In fact in December of 2010, ShowNearby became the top downloaded app in the App store, edging out thousands of other popular free apps in Singapore! It was then that we realized we needed a scalable solution to handle the increasing load and strain on our servers that our existing provider was unable to provide.

Our infrastructure at the time was hosted with a local service provider, but was unable to cope with the high traffic peaks we were facing.We analyzed a few vendors and decided to go ahead with Amazon because of it's reliability, high availability, range of services and pricing, but mostly because of its solid customer support.

As part of our deployment, we added AWS services incrementally. Currently we use extensively Amazon EC2 instances with auto scaling, Relational Database Service (RDS), Simple Queue Service (SQS), Cloudwatch and Simple Storage Service (S3).

Next item on our list is to focus on automating the deployment of infrastructure environments with cloud formations, as well as optimizing content delivery globally with Cloudfront.

Choosing the Tech Stack That Makes Business Sense

ShowNearby currently leverages on the LAMP stack for most our web services. Delivery of accurate, always available, location based data is ShowNearby’s top priority.That is why we chose AWS.

Other important things why to choose cloud/AWS: Speed and agility to create and tear down infrastructure as and when it is needed. Good and fast network accessibility for our app. Ability to scale up and out when needed. Ability to duplicate infrastructure into new regions.

Reaching Automation Nirvana with AWS

We chose to use AWS’s Linux based AMI and dynamically build on top of it using well defined, automatic configuration. Now, every time an instance is started, we are sure the infrastructure is always in a known state. Admittedly, a lot of hard work is involved to achieve “Automation Nirvana”, but knowing precisely what works at the end of the day helps us sleep at night.

We use Amazon S3 to store infrastructure configuration and user provided content/images. ShowNearby’s business is currently in, and marching into new, regions, so S3 is a natural precursor to AWS’s CloudFront content distribution service.

We use SQS to help process user behaviour and to determine usage patterns.

We use this to provide our dear users with a better, and hopefully, more personalised experience.We use spot instances for early development & testing servers.

We use CloudWatch extensively - how could we do without it?

We use RDS, for our hosted mySQL databased needs, of course

We use the command-line and PHP AWS API tools to a large extent, which provides us increased business agility.

Words of Wisdom for Mobile Startups

We would tell them to find partners who can be good friends at the same time. The race is long and tough, so better do it enjoying every step of the way. There is a window of opportunity in Asia now open to unleash your full potential, show what you are capable of and you'll be rewarded.

Today, if we need to refresh or update a web application, we restart new instances and flush out the old. Moving forward, we are looking into reducing the time between releases still further and so, we are working to improve on our already solid infrastructure and configuration management. Further automation in the form of Chef and/or Puppet or similar is being investigated.

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Enter Your Startup in the AWS Start-up Challenge!This year's AWS Start-up Challenge is a worldwide competition with prizes at all levels, including up to $100,000 in cash, AWS credits, and more for the grand prize winner. 7 Finalists receive $10,000 in AWS credits and 5 regional semi-finalists receive $2,500 in AWS credits. All eligible entries receive $25 in AWS credits. Learn more and enter today!

Although Summer is starting to ebb into Autumn in the northern hemisphere, it's just getting going south of the equator, so there is still time to profile another start-up in our on-going series of profiles!

Introducing Mendeley

Today I'm very happy to introduce you to Mendeley, a London based startup that harnesses cloud computing to help the academic community manage existing libraries of research, discover new research and collaborate with researchers around the world. They are simultaneously building the world’s largest crowd-sourced database of research covering all disciplines from Arts to Zoology. Mendeley’s software also anonymously aggregates all usage data in the cloud and tracks what articles are being read, by whom, when and how often.

Like a lot of great ideas, the founders of Mendeley set out to solve their own problem, and came up with the concept for Mendeley while studying for higher degrees in business, psychology and machine learning. The team includes many people with backgrounds in software development, academia and publishing.

I spoke to Dan Harvey, a Data Mining Engineer at Mendeley about how they came to use AWS:

"We started out buying our own hardware 3–4 years ago. Initially our main reasons for using AWS were due to being able to scale up far more quickly and cheaply than we could ourselves for document storage. Over time this is still true with regard to cost and scaling, but the elastic properties of EC2 mean we only have to pay for resources when we are using them. More recently we're finding that AWS gives our developers more flexibility to have the resources they need to test out new code and ideas, rather than stepping on one another's toes on shared servers"

Mendeley are using a wide collection of AWS services to power their fast growing business, which now manages over 100 million papers.

"We wanted to produce previews of these documents for use on our article pages on the web. This was done using a combination of Elastic Beanstalk to host a Java app to render PDFs into raw images, S3 to store the data, CloudFront to serve the images to end users, and SQS to glue this all together", said Dan.

Data driven

With such a rich collection of documents and data, Mendeley also provides tailored recommendations to its users, making use of Elastic MapReduce, and Mahout. Dan Harvey continues:

"Our latest use of AWS is with the Apache Mahout project. This is distributed collaborative filtering on top of the Hadoop framework; we use it to provide tailored recommendations for our users. We have our own Hadoop cluster internally but chose EMR for this because Mahout requires a different task granularity to our existing workload; we can optimise Hadoop on EMR for the specific recommendation task. It also allows us have a simple way of calculating the daily cost of recommendations based on the on-demand EC2 instances EMR uses with each run – with a multi-use Hadoop cluster it is very hard to allocate costs between the different tasks that run on the shared infrastructure. Finally, when we're done running recommendations, we can shut the cluster down and it costs us nothing."

Introduction to AWS

Dan will join us to talk about Mendeley's use of AWS in more detail at our upcoming Introduction to AWS event in London, where newcomers to the cloud can learn about how to build scalable, elastic applications on AWS. Attendance is free, but you'll need to register.

More information

Mendeley have their own API, with which developers can build applications... for science! The Mendeley Binary Battle, an API competition judged by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels and others, runs until the end of September.

If you're a start-up running on AWS, don't forget that there is still time to enter this year's AWS Start-up Challenge, a worldwide competition with prizes at all levels including $100,000 in cash and AWS credits for the grand prize winner. Learn more, and enter today.

Over the summer months, we'd like to share a few stories from startups around the world: what are they working on and how they are using the cloud to get things done. Today, we're profiling Classle, from Chennai, India!

I recently read Mark Suster’s blog on Avoiding Monoculture - which is why I’m happy to share with you what I’ve learned about Classle, a startup from India, focused on solving education problems for areas of the world that experience serious resource constraints. Classle has the big goal of changing the world around them by encouraging students and experts to share knowledge and expertise, and using the AWS cloud to facilitate this exchange.

Classle is a Social Learning infrastructure company with specific focus on Education, Learning and Knowledge communities. Using the main Classle product, Cloud Campus platform, Classle creates and manages private and public social learning environments and offers services based on it.

Classle helps rural students access higher education and reach opportunities unavailable before. Our company partners with a wide network of colleges throughout India, which act as internet-connected "learning nodes" that distribute educational materials to students. When the student goes home for the day with their downloaded lectures and other materials from the library, Classle makes use of mobile technology and SMS-based quizzes to keep students engaged and actively learning. The entire system was designed to work with simple, $10 phones, not smartphones, and the students are entirely addicted to these quizzes - they can’t get enough of them.

All these services are provided free of charge to both students and colleges. Classle monetizes by partnering with companies who are looking to hire top talent from among the students, and by selling their cloud-based learning platform for training purposes within companies.

Starting Small and Growing with Business

We are using AWS since our inception in early 2009. Our first steps involved two small Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon EBS to store our database. Over the years, our use has expanded to match our business growth. Our selection criteria covered tactical as well as strategic points. From a tactical perspective, we wanted a quicker time for provisioning, which AWS on-demand instances enabled, and the option to secure our resource needs through Reserved Instances.

At a strategic level, we wanted to provide the best experience for our customers and it was key to build Classle on top of services, products, and infrastructure designed for growth and scale. To date, we have established relationships with over 30 educational organizations and that list is constantly growing. Thanks to AWS, we are effectively competing with some large and strong players in the e-learning space.

Starting a company is always hard, whether you’re from India or anywhere else. However, it’s worth to keep in mind that it’s never been easier to go out there and try things out - with Open Source for robust software and cloud service providers like AWS for infrastructure, you can test your ideas and run a business at very low cost.

Being from in India, where we don’t have a strong start-up mentality like in the U.S., certainly poses some unique challenges. There are many more problems to solve, and it is exciting to try and translate the existing limitations into innovations, solutions and hence opportunities.

If I had to boil down my advice, I would say to my fellow entrepreneurs to: venture with confidence, design for scale, start small & architect for growth.

Representatives from all these firms will be present at our final event in California, where our AWS executive team will meet and select one global, grand prize winner.

All finalists will have an opportunity to meet these VCs in a lightning round or "speed dating" round and then during social events. VCs will confer their thoughts and recommendations to our AWS executive team, who will weigh their feedback before making the final decision. You can read more about each one below.

Enter the AWS Start-up Challenge Today!

If you haven't entered the contest yet - what are you waiting for? :) Deadline is fast approaching on October 2nd, at 11:59:59 P.M. (PT).

For over 25 years, Accel and its entrepreneurs have shared a common vision: be first. First to see the opportunity, first to define a category, and first to transform the industry. We partner with entrepreneurs around the world who have unique, breakthrough ideas and the courage to be first. Accel Partners

Andreessen-Horowitz is a stage-agnostic venture capital firm that provides seed, venture and growth stage funding to the best new technology companies. Founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz helps entrepreneurs become successful CEOs and build important and enduring companies. Its general partners are Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, John O'Farrell and Scott Weiss, all widely recognized experts in the creation, scaling, and operation of high growth technology companies.The firm has $1.2 billion under management across two funds. Among its 30 investments are Facebook, Foursquare, Groupon, Skype, Twitter, and Zynga. The firm was established in June 2009 and is located in Menlo Park, CA.

DFJ backs extraordinary entrepreneurs everywhere who set out to change the world. DFJ achieves its mission through its DFJ Global Network of Partner Funds with operations in the US, China, India, Korea, Vietnam, Russia, Europe, Israel, Brazil, and Japan. Over the past 25 years, DFJ and its partners have backed over 600 companies, and have pioneered the way in emerging technology markets including the Internet, mobile communications, clean energy and health care

Madrona has been investing in early-stage technology companies in the Pacific Northwest since 1995 and has been privileged to play a role in some of the region's most successful technology ventures. The firm invests predominately in seed and Series A rounds across the information technology spectrum including consumer Internet, commercial software and services, digital media and advertising, networking and infrastructure, and wireless. Madrona currently manages over $650 million and was an early investor in companies such as Amazon.com, Isilon Systems, Farecast, iConclude, World Wide Packets and ShareBuilder. To learn more, visit www.madrona.com.